Before joining the University of Washington, Heer was an assistant professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, from 2009 to 2013. He is also co-founder and Chief Experience Officer of Trifacta.[4] Heer's research focuses on new systems and techniques for data visualization. As a member of the Stanford University faculty, he worked with Mike Bostock on the Protovis and D3.js systems. Along with Joe Hellerstein and Sean Kandel, Heer has also developed interactive tools for data transformation (including Data Wrangler[5]), leading to the founding of Trifacta. Other research contributions include work on the graphical perception of visualizations, social data analysis, text visualization, and interactive language translation tools.